June 19th, 2010 was the first of a pair of Phish concerts at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, also known as SPAC.

(By some sort of force of habit my finger typed an “e” at the end of that last little transmission and I must say it had never occurred to me until now that SPAC was the word “space” without an “e”. How is it that nobody has taken advantage of this yet? To my knowledge the town does not have a drinking establishment called the SPAC Bar, the area surrounding Saratoga Springs is somehow not known as “outer SPAC”, no business called no Storage SPAC…I think we can all be thankful that I missed my calling.)

I just asked m’lady where we had stayed for this run and she wasn’t sure either. Funny, this was coming off of a pair of shows in Hartford that we both remember quite well so you’d think our memories would come a little easier but alas, I guess I’ve been to SPAC too many times to keep it all straight. A guy could have worse problems.

We stayed at one of two places for certain, either the cheap little strip motel just steps outside of Saratoga State Park (which holds the venue) and right next to a delicious barbecue joint or in the…one of those generic but nice places halfway between the town and the park…maybe the Hilton Garden Inn? Anyway, the sketchy cheap motel is generally my favourite place to stay in town (the house/hotel with the big social front porch runs a close second), so for the sake of pleasant nostalgia let’s say we stayed at the cheap strip motel this time.

Let’s even go further and say that this was the time that I’d brought along my mandolin and I spent most of my spare time sitting in a half-round plastic chair in front of my room strumming and making friends with all the other people who spent most of their spare time sitting in half-round plastic chairs in front of their rooms, which was basically everyone. And all the while the aroma of delicious barbecue wafted through the air. I tell you, it was just this side of heaven.

But let’s get to the show, shall we? It was definitely one for the ages.

Get this: the band opened(!) the first set with Tweezer Reprise, completing a mini-gag that had begun at the previous show, which they had ended by playing Reprise twice in-a-row. They’d played it twice to make up for not playing it at the concert the night before that (when they play Tweezer in a show – as they did then – they pretty much always play Tweezer Reprise later in the same show, naturally). It had been an inside joke in Hartford and it was an even bigger inside joke here at SPAC but with Phish the whole crowd is generally on the inside. It was genuinely pretty funny – I was laughing out loud – not to mention a downright raging way to open a show.

And a raging show it remained, picking up from Reprise with the ever-rockin’ Chalkdust Torture. There was also a Suzy Greenberg in there somewhere, and a Sample, a Bowie, and a Fluffhead too. When the second song of the encore came I was pretty sure that Character Zero was going to be the final air-guitaring of the night but no, Trey had one more rock and roll chuckle waiting.

Tweezer Reprise closer. Hilarious, and truly awesome; I’m talking 20,000 people screaming and jumping up and down with both fists in the air. I wonder if Trey thought up such a funny little joke right on the spot?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a “SPAC…the final frontier” t-shirt to design.

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